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A former graduate student falsified or fabricated data in a manuscript submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, according to the Office of Research Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In a finding released Dec. 8, ORI said that Matthew Endo, a former graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” caused false data to be recorded, and “falsified and/or fabricated data and related images” by altering, reusing, or relabeling them.

Endo has agreed to a settlement, effective Nov. 16, which requires him to work under supervision for three years on projects supported by the U.S. Public Health Service, among other conditions.

The manuscript entitled “Amphotericin primarily kills human cells by binding and extracting cholesterol” was submitted to PNAS, but withdrawn prior to peer review.

Specifically, ORI found that Endo used tactics to make results look better than they actually were, such as altering a laboratory test result to make a drug preparation “appear more pure than in the actual results of experimentation,” and lying about the number of times he’d run an experiment. As an example:

In Manuscript 1, Respondent caused falsified and/or fabricated results to be recorded by knowingly requesting biological testing of a mixture of compounds that he falsely claimed to be a single compound…

The notice did not indicate when these infractions took place, nor when they were discovered. ORI noted the finding was based on:

Respondent’s admission, an assessment conducted by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and analysis conducted by ORI in its oversight review …

Endo committed misconduct while working on research supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, according to the ORI. The principal investigator for that grant, titled “Synthesis and study of amphotericin B derivatives,” is Illinois professor Martin Burke, the corresponding author on the 2012 PNAS paper. When we called Burke to ask about the case, he told us:

There is nothing to retract because the paper was never published.

He declined to answer any questions and referred us to Melanie Loots, Chief of Staff for the Vice Chancellor of Research.

Loots told us:

All of the available information on this issue is in the ORI release.

Update, 1730 UTC, 12/13/17: Kathy Svitil, Director of Research Communications at Caltech, told us Endo no longer works in the Ondrus lab. She declined to say when he left, or under what circumstances he left.